I'm more thinking the Gigabyte as a small storage server. Cut the end of the PCIe slot out & populate it with a SATA/SAS card (from the pics it looks like it will have no problem with at least an 8x card fitting in) and put a mini-PCIe SATA card in for more storage. Then add 8GB of RAM,some HDDS & boot FreeNAS off a thumb drive and it should do fairly well.Reply

Rather get a PCIe x1 extender and cut the end off that, that way you don't void the warranty on the board.

This CPU/board is looking very promising for a fileserver. I'd like to see some performance numbers though, especially against the current cream of the low-end crop, the G465. I have one of the latter and it's slow as molasses (probably mostly due to the single physical core) so anything that feels more responsive is better in my books.Reply

thats true ,i found them to be around £300 +VAT for the octacore but its a shame Intel do not include their generic AVX/2 blocks in all their cores today so there's no incentive to actually optimize all the apps you would run there for far better SIMD data throughput or id try them today, at least Linaro are optimizing all the apps one by one for NEON SIMD as standard, we shall see what happens this year with their 64bit coresReply

I think atom still has SIMD, just not as wide and capable as those of the desktop and laptop cores, but that's the price you pay for better power efficiency. Something comparable to the previous (current market) generation of NEON.

And at any rate, at a data server, you'd rarely need to crunch that much data, especially considering hardware on-board encryption/decryption, hashing, packet offloading and such are usually present. Obviously this is a narrow market, much more narrow than 1 or 2 CPU servers and workstations, which come with all AVX bells and whistles and even possibly multiple phi.Reply

i would hold much potential in the phi just yet even if you have a need for32x 8 bit integer16x 16 bit integer8x 32 bit integer4x 64 bit integerplain 256 bit as per current AVX2 and its assumed they will double these for their 512bit AVX3.1 the generic current CoreLink CCN-508 NOC can deliver up to 1.6 terabits of sustained usable system bandwidth per second with a peak bandwidth of 2 terabits per second (256 GigaBytes/s) at processor speeds scaling all the way up to 32 processor cores total..... at least on paper

Intel's Knights Landing Xeon Phi due in 2015 with its antiquated QPI interconnect and its expected ultra short-reach (USR) interconnection only up to 500MB/s data throughput seems a little/lot short on real data throughput by then, Intel seem to need to go to Wide IO/HMC and a far better ultra short-reach interconnect to their GDDR5 high latency ultra short-reach (USR) ram ASAP it seems....http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/17/intel_knig..."Intel is not saying precisely what processor socket the future Knights Landing chip will slip into, but the most obvious one is the socket shared by the Xeon E5 of the time. All that Hazra would confirm was that the idea is to deploy 14-nanometer processes to cram more transistors onto the Knights Landing chip and to get around some of the bottlenecks with the PCI-Express 3.0 bus that current coprocessors of any kind are adversely affected by."

"He would not discuss if memory for the future Xeon Phi would link in over the QuickPath Interconnect or by some other means, but he did say that Intel would be stacking the memory onto the processor package and that Knights Landing would have "leadership compute and memory bandwidth".so again that would probably be HMC style 2.5DReply

QPI is not an antiquated bus just because it was only used in a single generation of consumer parts prior to bringing the north bridge onto the CPU itself. It's still used on Xeon's released this year as the multi-socket interconnect bus.Reply

in your opinion, sure, however calling http://www.chiphell.com/data/attachment/forum/2012...2 QPI interconects giving a max total throughput of just 51.2 GB/s, and Intel restructuring the platform in such a way that the on board network interface controllers will now be wired to the PCI-Express so called by PR "root complexes" of the processors, rather than the chipset so as to try and remove some of that traffic from interfering with the core antiquated interconnects.Reply

calling 2 QPI interconects giving a max total throughput of just 51.2 GB/s not antiquated in 2014 for the best Intel have in generic x86 server land (never mind retail) seems odd when you consider that LSI Axxia® 4500 Family of ARM SOC NOC (network On Chip) gives you upto 256 GigaBytes/sReply

I'm currently using a Celeron 847 (Sandy Bridge) ITX board for an Open Media Vault server and these BayTrail boards look to offer a slight bump to efficiency and value proposition at the cost of a few features. This could pass as a basic file server, but as you note it would require some level of customization.

My wishlist features for a new low power/low cost server are ECC support, external 12~19V power input instead of the ATX 24&4 pin connectors, at least 4 SATA ports, and USB 3. File servers with any sort of RAID and many TB's of storage really should consider ECC. Also, for a system that draws maybe 15-20W total, the ATX power supply options in this power range are pretty much just PicoPSUs. Any typical SFF/FlexATX or standard power supplies will be incredibly inefficient at such a low load.

I would love to see an Avoton Atom (C2530 or C2550) or Bay Trail-I Atom (E3845) variant which would be a much better fit for a small server. Avoton would lose USB 3 and require some form of onboard graphics solution but adds more PCI-E lanes, more SATA ports (C2550 only), multiple integrated Intel NICs, and AES-NI support. I look forward to the seeing the results of Anandtech's Avoton testing (possibly an ASRock or Supermicro board with a C2750?), but the boards I have seen are in the ~$275-400 price range. Single-threaded performance is possibly a slight regression from low power Ivy Bridge/Haswell Celerons. A comparison of these Silvermont-based CPUs against one on more of the 847, 1037U, 1047UE (has ECC), 2955U, and/or 2980U Celerons would be very helpful in assessing IPC vs multi-threaded throughput.Reply

Now why would file servers need error correcting RAM? - Any copy errors are caught by the file transfer protocols. Are you worried about general server stability, or do you plan to use that 10 W CPU to transcode files.?Reply

;) you have never tried SD encoding on an A9 dual cortex with the ARM port of FFMpeg i take it ! it works quite well with the right batch file lines to MP4 containers using the -maxrate 2100k -bufsize 2100k -refs 3 -preset faster directives.Reply

My current home server acts not only as a typical NAS (Samba, FTP, rsync, SSH), but also runs Plex Media Server, MythTV backend, VirtualBox, MySQL, and eventually zoneminder or similar. Server stability is generally adequate without ECC, but long-term, robust data integrity is more critical. Like everyone, I have files such as pictures, financial records, etc. which are irreplaceable. Yes, protocols can catch and usually resolve errors at the transport level, but that is only part of the data path.

I have elected to use SnapRAID to implement block-level checksums (mitigate bit rot) and shared parity (recover from drive failures) that operates on top of standard file systems. However, there is still a potential gap in the integrity of the data path. If something is buffered/cached/active in RAM there is still a very small, but real chance that a bit could flip and then get written to my storage pool. No manner of RAID, ZFS, etc. will catch this. The file will be permanently corrupted and must be restored from another backup copy if available. This is where ECC provides value.Reply

Because the OS uses RAM as a filesystem cache and you don't want it to have bogus data. Especially when it comes to writing data back to the filesystem. One of my RAM sticks started failing on me and caused some minor data corruption a couple of months back. It's very weird running md5sum on the same file 3 times in a row and getting 3 separate results.Reply

Why cut? You can get up to 8 SATA II ports on a native PCIe x1 card. And its not like this CPU will be fast enough to worry about the controller speed.

Then again, whats the point of a low-power SFF board if you add a power-consuming additional controller put it in a case with half a dozen HDDs? For the same money, and in basically the same power and space envelopes, you can just get yourself a µATX board with 6 native SATA ports and a Haswell-Celeron with a lot more computing power for your more complex storage needs.Reply

In fact all Bay Trail cpus are 64bit capable.(Though the z atom platforms such as the transformer t100 came with 32bit uefi bios so far which made it more or less impossible to use in 64bit mode even with linux, but I'm pretty sure these here shouldn't have any such problems, they officially also support windows 64bit).Reply

Problem is, some router distros like PFsense are pretty far behind in supporting the newer Intel NICs (and even worse for wireless NICs). So you might end up having to add a dual PCIe NIC card anyway, which then rules out a lot of really compact mini-ITX cases like the Mini-Box M350.Reply

The motherboard manufacturer is doing nothing of the kind, this SOC only supports 2 SATA ports, 2 PCI-E and DDR3L. There isn't anything they can do about that. Remember, is a tiny little cut-rate chip. It's amazing that they can bundle a CPU and motherboard of any kind for ~$60, let alone one that is actually capable of running desktop applications and Windows.Reply

Looks like Intel is extremely worried about causing damage to their regular desktop market to release a product this crippled. This artificial market segmentation is what you get when you don't have competition. Lets hope one of the ARM vendors will force their hand to release more useful chips.Reply

Both of the boards only supports 64-bit Windows 8, both has 64-bit UEFI. GNU/Linux shouldn't be much of an issue. That Bay-Trail-M doesn't have drivers is because Windows doesn't yet support connected standby on 64-bit versions.Reply

Unfortunately it needs either more sata ports or a raid card, or more network ports or a network card. There is an expansion slot, so it's not a deal breaker, but if it had dual nic's and more sata ports built in, it could be a real interesting file server or router for cheap. Reply

You all are funny. It's a $60 board/cpu combo capable of running 64bit Windows.... but you all expect it to be tricked out and accomplish superhuman feats. It's a Budget SOC. If it doesn't suit your needs, it's because it's not marketed/created for you. So spend $100 on something else. Big deal.Reply

"The purpose for Bay Trail-D is tablet like performance in a desktop form factor" I didn't know that this was a desirable thing. I understand the opposite, desktop like performance in a tablet form factor. Are you talking about power usage?Reply

Note the warning "Please be noted that J1800I only supports Win 8/8.1 OS now.".Seems like there's no way to disable Secure Boot...!? Would make it useless for a lot of people.. Kinda like the disaster with the Atom Z5xx (video acceleration only on windows) or the N2800/D2700 (full functionality only on one OS, which is Win7 32bit)Reply

Thank you for mentioning the J1850 and J2850.(ark.intel.com pricing) they are $10 and $22 more respectively than the J1800 but give 2x cores, 2x cache at the same TDP.

At such a meager price difference, Intel would be better off ditching dual core CPUs altogether. Not just for the price difference but also for programming, to encourage the transition to multi-threaded apps.

At the price for this though, it is pretty cool for what you get. It's actually faster than my 6 year old desktop that has a much higher TDP CPU.Reply